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Impress your colleagues with your knowledge about … .NET Debugging Information

Sometimes when working with C# you discover some hidden gems. Some of them very useful, other ones a little bit harder to find a good way to benefit from their functionality. One of those hidden gems that I want to share today is the magic behind debugging in .NET; PDB files.

Open a project in Visual Studio, right click on it and go to Properties. Go to the Build tab and click on the Advanced… button on the bottom of the screen.

In the Debugging information you can choose between Full, Pdb-only, or Portable. But what does this mean and what is the difference? Let’s find out…

Debugging information

By configuration the Debugging information, you can choose what info is generated by the compiler to help you debug your application. It has the following options:

  • none

    Specifies that no debugging information will be generated.

  • full

    Enables attaching a debugger to the running program.

  • pdbonly

    Allows source code debugging when the program is started in the debugger but will only display assembler when the running program is attached to the debugger.

  • portable

    Produces a .PDB file, a non-platform-specific, portable symbol file that provides other tools, especially debuggers, information about what is in the main executable file and how it was produced. This is the most recent cross-platform format for .NET Core.

  • embedded

    Embeds portable symbol information into the assembly. No external .PDB file is produced.

Which one should I choose?

If you use full, be aware that there is some impact on the speed and size of JIT optimized code and a small impact on code quality with full. For development purposes you want the full debugging experience so full will be the logical choice. pdbonly or none is recommended for generating release code.

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